


Circling the Drain

by cagestark



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Age Difference, And You Get a Flaw, As it should be, Dubious Consent, Everybody Gets a Flaw!, F/M, Homelessness, Hopefully no Mary-Sue's here, Mutants, OFC is 25, OFC is telepathic, You Get a Flaw, canon is ignored
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-30 01:07:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20088433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cagestark/pseuds/cagestark
Summary: Birdy: homeless one day, acting as the de facto mother of three other homeless mutant girls the next. Their mission: help the Avengers keep the world safe.(Birdy's personal mission: Keep Tony Stark Safe. Maybe fuck him too.)





	Circling the Drain

**Author's Note:**

> testing testing

Birdy fucks up.

Thursday in Chicago.

The McDonald’s across the street from the women’s shelter she haunts has a large flat screen tv facing the windows. She can stand out on the sidewalk and watch the morning news: words scrolling along the bottom of the screen, headlines spelled out in bold, reading what little lips she can here and there, and most importantly, the daily weather report. Windy, always. Rain, later. Hands jammed in her pockets, she crosses the street and ducks back into the warmth of the women’s shelter and relays the news. Nobody expected any different.

Birdy still has a place at the shelter for tonight, but priority goes to women with children. As it gets cold, the sun setting behind the oppressive clouds and wind blowing in off of the lake, she sits with the meager meal passed out (tonight it is ramen with spinach, eggs, and poppy-seed muffins) and counts the women shuffling in, watches her chances of sleeping in a warm dry bed waning and waning like the moon. Beside her sits a mother her own age, with a girl who looks nothing like her, only ten years old.

“You’re smaller than me, yeah?” the woman says, taking food off the girl’s plate. “So you don’t need as much as mama does, yeah?”

Against her will, Birdy relaxes something—some muscle, maybe—deep in her brain. She _listens_. Reading people’s thoughts isn’t how it looks to be in the movies. There aren’t so many sentences and it’s not so neatly laid out, more like trying to read the tags on the side of a passing train. Lots of garbled words. Lots and lots of pictures. The little girl is in good spirits, even if she’s hungry and even if she knows that it’s not going to get any better. She laments the loss of her muffins, since poppy-seeds are her favorite. The mama is foul and bitter, pictures circling around and around of a man with braids along his scalp, words tattooed on his knuckles that she can’t even read anymore because they’ve hit her so many times, they’re so split and scarred over, so much blood—

Birdy closes that door in her brain, closing her fists around the straps of her backpack that sits in her lap. _That’s why we don’t look_, she tells herself. It’s a lesson she has to relearn. Often. The woman running the shelter comes to tell her that they’ve filled up and there’s no more room for her. _Try the shelter two blocks over, and come back tomorrow to try here again_, she says and Birdy gives a thumbs up, knowing she won’t. The shelter two blocks over accepts men too, and it just isn’t safe. There are other places she could try, last resorts for when it’s so cold her fingers turn white.

When Mama takes her trays up, Birdy puts her uneaten muffins in front of the girl.

“Go to the bathroom and eat those before your mama gets back.”

With nowhere to go, she leans against the wall outside, headphones she stole on the subway weeks ago tucked into ears and the end of the cord tucked into her empty pocket, and she and listens. Watches as best as she can. The little girl shares the muffins. But her mama’s in a better mood for it. She’s a sweet kid. Birdy can tell, can’t blame her for it.

And in the girl’s mind, she sees her own face replaying again and again and again (limp dishwater blonde hair hanging out from underneath her beanie, the narrow upturned eyes, mouth chapped and frowning, so, _so_ unhappy), and she thinks nothing of it. She only wonders _is that how I really look?_

She has no idea how much she has fucked up.

#

Birdy ends up knocking on her ex’s apartment door, ten minutes past midnight, shivering so bad that her knees knock together. She’s soaked to the bone, hair dripping on the carpet in the hallway. He’s awake—always awake, coke on the kitchen counter beside a bundle of browning bananas. His head is shaved now, even though it wasn’t last week when she was here doing the same thing. He opens the door just wide enough for her to squeeze past, brushing against him. Graciously, he lets her shower and warm up before she sucks his dick in exchange for crashing on the couch.

When the sun is coming up and he finally goes to bed, she lays her wet clothes on his space heater, steals the money in his wallet, and flicks through the magazines on his coffee table. There’s an excellent article about Tony Stark’s latest charitable endeavors in New York, teaching mathematics to underprivileged adults. She mostly looks at the pictures. Tears those out, folds them up and tucks them deep in her bag.

A few hours of sleep does her good, keeping her mind open to the dreaming mind of the man in the next room in case he wakes early and she needs to bounce unexpectedly. Even though her clothes are still a little damp when she tugs the on, she disappears out the door as soon as she can keep her eyes open. Fifty-five dollars, mostly-dry clothes, and pictures of Tony Stark to keep her warm, all for sucking one average-sized dick?

“Damn, we stan a thrifty bitch,” she mutters, tucking her headphones in her ear.

And after walking twelve blocks, she is standing outside the McDonald’s in front of the women’s shelter, shivering as she watches the news, looking for the weather.

Friday in Chicago.

Cold. But dry.

Something catches her eye inside the McDonald’s. Seated against the window is a girl—woman, maybe, hard to tell. Tall, skinny, and baby faced, dressed like the ladies walking down in the richer districts, fair hair slicked back close to her skull. There is a coffee clutched between her hands, and sitting at the place across from her is another, unsipped. The girl motions to the coffee.

Birdy opens her mind, unsure. There are lots of people willing to buy a rough sleeper some coffee, but Birdy’s been fucked over too many times to trust even a girl this innocent and innocuous looking. When she goes to poke at the girl’s intentions, what she sees in the other’s mind makes her hair prickle up in horror: snapshots of herself, days and days’ worth. _Come in_, the girl thinks, clearly. Broadcasting. _I want to talk._

She runs for it. Tears come to her eyes as easy as breathing, and she fights against them. They blur her vision, make her bump into several people who shout. Whatever part of her brain that controls her gift—her curse—flexes and relaxes in terror, thoughts swarming and receding like waves dragging against the shores of her mind. Her lungs burn, hitching breathes that do nothing to abate the stinging stitch in her side as the pavement disappears underneath her worn shoes.

A girl steps out of the alleyway ahead. Birdy barely recognizes her through her tears as the girl she gave her muffins to at the shelter last night. Standing, she is even tinier and younger than she looked yesterday, dark skin contrasting prettily against her deep red coat. She lifts a tiny hand in a wave, but Birdy doesn’t stop running, can’t stop running because someone _knows_ somebody knows what she _is_—

—and at the next alley, the girl steps out again.

And the next.

“Quit runnin’!” the girl shouts. In her mind she says, _we’re like you. _

It stops her in her tracks, collapsing in the mouth of the alley, gagging on the ground from fear, from confusion, from running and running. There’s dirt and rocks and broken bits of bottles against her calloused palms. A little hand pats at her head, combs through the tangled hair that hangs down around Birdy’s shoulders. When she looks up, the girl grins, showing a missing tooth right at the front.

“You run slow,” she says. Conciliatorily: “But it was a real good try. _Real_ good.”

“Thanks,” Birdy croaks.

The girl from McDonald’s bursts into the alleyway, gelled hair disheveled. Her face is red, coffee’s abandoned. “Fuck me,” she mutters. “I buy you coffee and you don’t even have the decency to drink it? You owe me three dollars!”

“Who the fuck are you?” Birdy pants. She still doesn’t have the strength to stand, but shifts up to her shaking knees. “What do you want from me?”

The girl stares down at Birdy, looking haughty and anywhere from fourteen to twenty-two years of age. “Most succinctly,” she says, holding up fingers while she speaks. “I want you to use your powers for good. I want you to join us in an endeavor to protect the city and maybe the world from the forces of evil. I want to use you as our de facto figurehead so that we can legally obtain property and currency. And lastly? _I want three dollars_.”

**Author's Note:**

> this is just a test to see if anyone is interested. leave thoughts below <3


End file.
